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Patrons from The Patch, a gay bar in Wilmington owned at the time by Long Beach resident Lee Glaze, hold bouquets outside the Los Angeles Police Department Harbor Station during the 1968 “flower power” protest against police harassment. The protest is a significant milestone in gay history. It took place a year before the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City. Photo courtesy of Lee Glaze.

LONG BEACH – Though little known, the gay civil rights movement has some of its earliest roots in the Long Beach area.

Many historians say the gay community’s fight for justice and equality began in New York City in 1969 with the Stonewall Inn riots, a series of violent demonstrations by gay people against a police raid.

However, 10 months earlier, Long Beach resident Lee Glaze became a gay rights pioneer when he led a nonviolent rebellion against Los Angeles police harassment at his Wilmington gay bar, The Patch.

“The gay civil rights movement didn’t start at Stonewall,” said John D’Emilio, University of Illinois Chicago history professor and co-author of “Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America.”

These activists are protesting police brutality against gay people at the Black Cat tavern in Silver Lake. The year and identities of the people are unknown. The date might be circa Feb. 1967.

For the gay patrons of the Black Cat tavern in Silver Lake, it was an awful way to start to 1967.

As balloons dropped from the ceiling at midnight to mark the New Year, undercover Los Angeles Police Department cops ripped Christmas decorations from the walls, brandished guns, then beat and cuffed 14 people.

Two men arrested for kissing were later forced to register as sex offenders; one bartender suffered a ruptured spleen.

Patrons from The Patch, a gay bar in Wilmington owned at the time by Long Beach resident Lee Glaze, hold bouquets outside the Los Angeles Police Department Harbor Station during the 1968 “flower power” protest against police harassment. The protest is a significant milestone in gay history. It took place a year before the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City. Photo courtesy of Lee Glaze.

This article is part of an on-going series on local and regional LGBT history and pioneers.

Former Long Beach resident Lee Glaze, 74, who lives in Hollywood, was an early gay rights rebels. He led a Stonewall-like rebellion in his Wilmington gay bar, The Patch, Aug. 17, 1968, a year before the Stonewall Rebellion, which got much more press. Glaze had been warned by the police commission that if he wanted his bar to stay in business, he had to prohibit not only drag but also groping, male-male dancing and more than one person at a time in the bathrooms.

Glaze tried to comply, but boldly reinstated dancing. Then vice squad officers burst in with half a dozen uniformed policeman and began making arrests. Glaze told the crowd that the Patch would post bail for the arrested men. Glaze and the patrons went to a nearby flower shop owned by one of the patrons and bought all the gladioli, mums, carnations, roses and daisies. At 3 a.m., the demonstrators carried huge bouquets into the Los Angeles Police Department Harbor Station and staged a “flower power” protest as they waited for the arrested men to be released.

The University of California at Davis police officer who casually and systematically pepper-sprayed students at the university was named in a 2003 discrimination lawsuit alleging he used an anti-gay slur against an openly-gay officer, the Daily Mail reports.

The racial and sexual discrimination lawsuit specifically singled out Lt. John Pike, a retired United States Marine sergeant, for “using a profane anti-gay epithet” against a gay police officer.

The case was settled for $250,000, the article says.

Put that in your pepper sprayer.

(Lt. John Pike of the University of California, Davis police department)